Tag Archives: Comic books

Movie Review: Man of Steel

You’ve seen the trailers. Everybody knows the story. It’s Superman. What can you really say about a Superman movie? Americans are more familiar with Kal-El’s origins than they are with the Bible. There’s nothing to spoil here. There’s nothing to do except comment on what worked and, unfortunately, everything that didn’t.

The previous new Superman movie was so bad that I personally thought that the man in the red cape was going to be condemned to at least a twenty-year exile from the big screen. But no sooner did the tepid reviews of Superman Returns start trickling in than Hollywood announced plans for a reboot.

And then they teased it out like you can only tease out a big superhero movie. In any other genre, audiences won’t have the patience for these types of games. Like, a year before the release, they’ll show a glimpse of the costume’s shoulder pad. And then a month later a poster. This all culminated in the onslaught of trailers released in the past month or so.

Which, I’m sorry to say, kind of baited me in. The previews looked great. Everything felt cool and modern. I was actually sort of looking forward to a Superman movie, I couldn’t believe it. But then I saw it, and the cynical jaded part of my brain laughed at how gullible I’d been. Because a stunning three-minute trailer does not guarantee a whole two-plus-hour feature film.

It’s stupid to complain about the story, but I’ll do it anyway. How many times are we audiences expected to sit through another tried-and-true opening of Jor-El sending his infant son to escape from the dying planet Krypton? Russell Crowe gives a totally generic and bland performance as Superman’s biological dad. He tries warning the Kryptonian leaders about the planet’s imminent destruction. Nobody listens.

General Zod shows up. There’s a chase scene. There’s a flying bird thing that Jor-El rides around, and it’s almost exactly like the flight scenes from Avatar, only sepia-toned. General Zod gets banished to the Phantom Zone. Wow! So exciting. I really can’t imagine where they came up with such a novel idea for a Superman origin movie.

And then it’s just this weird out of order montage of Clark Kent growing up, learning about his powers, about himself. Even though Jor-El dies, he’s somehow still around the rest of the movie, talking to Superman in his weird Russell Crowe pseudo-English accent. General Zod has an American accent. I never understood why they don’t just streamline the accents at casting. It doesn’t matter, really, because everyone on Krypton speaks English I guess, that’s all that’s important.

You know what? I’m not even going to talk about the plot anymore. There are some cool scenes here and there, but ultimately it’s a boring, boring movie. It goes on forever. There are a lot of grandiose ideas and sweeping shots filled with a larger-than-life Superman-ish score. A lot of the more glaring plot holes are either casually written-off or more blatantly ignored. Like Kevin Costner talking about why the government didn’t show up to collect the spaceship. “I don’t know why they didn’t come. They just didn’t.” Or when a bearded Clark Kent shows up at Jor-El’s twenty-thousand year old spaceship and emerges in a Kryptonian Superman costume, totally clean-shaven.

And then it’s just punch, punch, fly, kick, hit, punch, heat-vision eyes, punch, shove, fly, swoop, kiss, punch, punch, punch, punch, fly, punch, fly for the rest of the movie.

And is it just me, or do the effects here feel kind of cheap? It’s like, maybe Avatar set the bar pretty high in terms of digital graphics, but every new CGI laden movie that comes out lately, it feels like the artists are just rushing through the film. Everything’s kind of blurry, just a little too intentionally soft around the edges. I keep seeing the preview for World War Z and it looks just the same, like a bad cartoon. Also, another note about cinematography here, they went for the whole shaky camera thing, which, I don’t know, I guess it was supposed to make me feel like I was chasing Superman or something? And what about those sun glare spots? That’s like the first thing that everybody makes fun of in modern movies. Why are they still doing it?

Whatever, I can make snarky comments about the production all I want. But I’m mostly kidding. This was a highly polished big budget Superman movie. It looked cool. It would have been good as a series of ten-minute installments. Really, the problem lies with the Superman story. We’re talking about a character that’s older than my dead grandfather here. His story is legend and as such it is immune to change.

So what do we have? Just this never-ending intro, an infinite origin story. Superman is all beginning, no end, not even a middle anywhere in sight. To make Superman relevant, to keep the character interesting, someone’s eventually going to have to do something wildly different. But in a good way, not in the blue electric Superman from the 90s. Otherwise he’s destined to a fate of obscurity. Maybe not immediately, maybe not this generation, but eventually there’s going to be another Superman origin movie released, and all the kids are going to look at this giant S and think, this is boring. Man of Steel was boring.

These comic books don’t make any sense

I’m always thinking about comic books, about superheroes, and I know it’s really nerdy to ask questions, to point out inconsistencies, but sometimes I’m just like, I can’t take it any more, I need to bring this stuff up, I can’t enjoy the stories because these glaring problems are just stuck right in the center of my mind.

Like Spider-Man, right? Just try gettin past the fact that if he wanted to do some serious good, he could’ve sold his webbing device to a huge company, he could have made billions on his inventions. With those profits, he could have financed like a professional crime fighting operation. Think about what Batman did with his billions. He bought all sorts of ridiculous stuff. But Spider-Man’s always thinking small, just using his webbing to get from point A to point B, living in poverty, barely scraping out a living.

OK forget about that, just accept the fact that he’s this scientific genius that can’t figure out how to make any money. What about his wall-crawling powers? How are those supposed to work? Like, in the Spider-Man movies, it’s these little microscopic spider claw things that come out of his skin, which I don’t buy, because if I did buy it, what happens when he puts on his costume? Those micro-claws are supposed to be able to get through the material and then cling onto whatever it is he’s crawling up? Sorry, I can’t believe it. It doesn’t make any sense.

Let’s go back to Batman for a second. Don’t think he’s getting off just because I was commenting before on how wisely he spends his money, buying all of his bat-equipment, his bat-planes, and bat-mobiles, and bat-cycles, and bat-copters. My problem is, OK, sometimes the police are after him, like think about the second Batman movie. Right? And they’re like, “Who is Batman? Why can’t we figure this out?”

And I’m just like, are you serious? Get a police helicopter or a police plane or something, or call up the army and have them put one of those drones in the sky, right? And just point a bunch of cameras or satellites down at the earth, and the next time Batman takes his giant car or plane or experimental waterskis out for a spin, just follow it wherever it goes. It’s not that hard. We live in a really sophisticated world. The police could watch the bat-mobile driving away to some hole by the road. OK, now go check that road out. Now call for backup. There you go, that’s the bat-cave. It can’t be that hard.

Like it’s the same with the X-Men. Where the hell are you going to get some giant invisible supersonic airplane? And the air traffic controllers, what, they don’t see any blips on their equipment when they’re directing traffic? Cyclops, like what kind of flight training does this guy have? How come he’s never crashing into any other planes? And again, the military doesn’t notice these jets everywhere? You’d think they’d see it immediately and get on it, find out where it is, who owns it. Is it the Russians? The Chinese? Terrorists? No, it’s the fucking X-Men, but still.

And while I’m on the X-Men, come on, so Cyclops can blast laser beams from his eyes but what, his eyelids don’t get blown off? And Wolverine, whatever, you’ve got metal bones, you don’t age, fine. But what’s with that haircut? What kind of a person wakes up in the morning, sees that both sides of his hair stick straight up in these weird spikes, and thinks to himself, huh, OK, that’s a pretty good look. What, and then he designed his costume to make sure that those spikes stayed in place? What kind of a statement is he trying to make? I don’t understand.

I don’t get why the Green Lantern’s powers don’t work against the color yellow. Isn’t the color green just a mix of the colors blue and yellow? So how can green even work at all then if it’s really just half yellow? And what about orange? That’s half yellow also. What about when he has to pee, that’s yellow, does it hurt coming out? Does it take away from his powers? The sun’s yellow. How is he able to walk around outside during the daytime without getting hurt?

How is the Flash able to breathe when he’s running so fast? How are his shoes not wearing out every time he runs a couple of laps around the world? How is Mr. Fantastic’s costume able to stretch exactly like Mr. Fantastic stretches? What is it painted on? How come Ice Man isn’t soaking wet every time he de-ices? What, does it go from ice to air? How does it do that without going to liquid first?

And what about Superman? He never makes a mistake? He never gets bored, or lazy? What’s the super-equivalent of throwing a gum wrapper on the ground because nobody’s looking and you just really don’t feel like holding that wrapper anymore, looking for a garbage can, never finding any garbage cans? You don’t think he ever makes a mistake like that? Like, OK, I just saved this rocket from crash landing out of orbit, but I don’t feel like figuring out what I’m supposed to do with all of this debris. Do I have to bring it to the government? Are they going to ask me to just hold on a second while they figure out which branch of the military has to take care of this? Or is it more like, jeez, I’m tired, I just caught this rocket, and I’m really hungry, and I don’t feel like dealing with this anymore, so nobody’s looking, I’ll just toss it in the ocean. Come on, somebody make a story like that, give me something to relate to. Everything’s just so unbelievable.

I love playing sports

I wasn’t good at sports until I was like twenty-five years old. It’s like, once I got past high-school, out of college, on my own for a few years, once I was at the point where I’d really never find myself in a setting to play sports, I got good at them. And when I say good, I’m speaking relatively. I’m sure if you talked to my friends or family members, they’d say I still suck at sports. But I’m much better than I was when I was younger.

From an early age, I always sucked at sports. Like most little kids in suburbia, my parents signed me up for everything, t-ball, baseball, soccer, basketball. I was terrible at everything. I remember specifically this one baseball game – I must have been pretty little still because it was the type of baseball where somebody’s dad did all of the pitching – and my dad was like, “Robbie, if you get a hit today I’ll take you to the comic book store.”

Jesus Christ I wanted to go to the comic book store. Superman had just died and, not being in a socioeconomic position to go out and buy these books every week by myself, I kind of just had to rely on listening to other people talk about it. And there was no Internet and allo of my friends were in the same boat, so nobody knew what they were talking, everybody making up lies about Superman. Please just get a hit. All I have to do it just touch the bat to the ball and it’s comic book time.

I remember not hitting the ball. Maybe there was a foul, but it didn’t count. And I remember my dad taking me anyway, even though I didn’t really come through on my end of the deal. Baseball was tough. Not only because I sucked at sports, but because baseball is so long. Like I like watching baseball, on TV, because there’s plenty of room for snack breaks and video game breaks.

But playing a whole game of baseball? Nine innings? And they always stuck me way in the outfield. So it’s just me, standing there. The chances of another little kid actually hitting a baseball hard enough to make it to where I was standing were infinitesimal. But laying down on the grass yelled at. “Stand up! Pay attention to what’s going on!”

I actually didn’t have that much time to lie down. There were always like one or two dragonflies way out there in the outfield. I mean, yeah, dragonflies don’t do anything, but they’re big, and noisy, and they go about their lives as if human beings don’t exist. Like they don’t make any conscious effort to avoid you. They might come buzzing an inch from your face. That’s pretty nerve wracking. My palms are actually getting sweaty just thinking about it. So yeah, outfield was really this whole stretch of time just trying to avoid these stupid bugs.

And then soccer. I only played one season. It was pretty uncharacteristic of my parents to let me abandon something after only one season, but I sucked at soccer so bad that they had to make an exception to their sports policies. My coach’s name was Ben Dash. His son’s name was Ben Dash. What is it about parents having to coach their own kids? Isn’t there an inherent conflict of interest? Yeah, but I guess it’s a little weirder if you recruit adults with no connection to the kids at all. Still.

One game stands out in my head especially. After being allotted the bare minimum of playing time all season, Coach Dash screams out during one of our games, “G___, in!” I couldn’t believe it. Showtime. I run out onto the field and immediately intercept the ball. Holy shit, I couldn’t believe this was finally happening for me. I hear screaming. Everything’s getting blurry. All of the blood is rushing to my head in excitement. No time to sit down and tremble, I have to keep moving.

Other kids coming at me. I’m dodging them. I’m doing it. There’s the net. Shoot! Blocked, right into the goalie’s hands. “G___, out!” What the hell? I just shot on net. Wait a second, why is everybody laughing? It turned out that I shot on my own goal. All of those kids I dodged? They were my teammates. Even my parents were laughing.

I played the rest of the season, but I swear, and maybe this is some sort of built-in defense mechanism, but that is the only memory that I have of that whole season. That, and some teammate named Arturo, and his dad, who’d stand at the sidelines of every single game and scream, “Pass it to Arturo! Pass it to Arturo!” over and over again, like the only reason any of our parents signed us up for soccer was that somebody we might have the opportunity to pass it to Arturo.

Anyway, I still love playing sports. I love running around. I’m in good shape. I wish I were better when I was younger. I wish I could have had some cool sports memories, maybe like something where I’m a troubled youngster, and I wind up joining some pee-wee hockey league, but the coach isn’t into it, he’s only there because a judge told him he had to do it. But throughout the course of the season we’d all develop really strong bonds, and eventually we’d overcome insurmountable odds to win the championship. That would have been awesome.

Getting philosophical

A couple of years ago I tried to be all smart and sophisticated so I downloaded all of the works of Plato onto my Kindle. And I sat there and read for a little while, and I tried really hard, to furrow my brow, to give off the image of a man thinking, really thinking, like a deep serious thinking. After a while I realized that I didn’t need to try that hard, because the text was so complicated that I really didn’t have to put any effort into looking confused, my brow was actually furrowing naturally. This went on for like twenty minutes, and then I started getting bored. I really wanted somebody to come in the room and be like, “Wow, Rob, you really look like you’re working on something pretty tough, what is it?” and I’d say, “Oh, you know, just Plato, just brushing up on some Plato.”

But nobody saw me. My wife walked by, but she didn’t ask what I was reading. And after her sitting across from me for like five minutes, I finally said, “Hey, don’t you want to know what I’m reading?” and she said, “No, not really.”

And then I told myself I’d take a five minute break, let all of that philosophy sink in. But that was it. That was the last time I opened that. I read for like twenty minutes and the progress bar at the bottom of the Kindle hadn’t even moved up one percent. There’s no way I was going to get through any of that.

I took some philosophy classes in college. All prerequisite stuff. It was all really tough, not the class, but the assignments. “Go home from class, ignore all of your friends playing Super Smash Brothers down the hall, close the door to your room and read seventy-five pages of Descartes.” Actually, that was pretty much my entire college education, choosing between going to the library or staying in and watching The Boondock Saints with everybody in the dorm. No thanks. I’ll just take a B please.

Every once in a while I’ll read an article or book about a famous person, a writer, Abraham Lincoln, somebody accomplished. When writing about how smart somebody is, the word to use is devour. This person devoured books and newspapers. They devoured Plato.

Besides being an overused word, devour never connected with me. I like reading, but devouring the classics? Being able to not only read an old book, but to sit there and be unable to pull myself away from the page? That’s something that I don’t have inside. One time a couple of years ago I downloaded a bunch of old books. I started with Crime and Punishment. After spending an hour just trying to get through the first ten pages, I realized the enormity of the challenge ahead. Still, I pressed on. I wanted to prove to myself that I could finish one giant old book. It took me forever, but finally I did it.

And then I looked at all of the other giant books I had downloaded, War and Peace, Moby Dick, Infinite Jest, not to mention all of that unread Plato. There’s no way. I just can’t get myself to be engaged. And these are all recognized masterpieces, right? What’s missing from my life, what does somebody else have inside of them, to be so engaged in a book that, right now, I can’t sit through for even ten minutes? I want to be able to feel like that too.

I’d probably have to have no electricity, I’d have to live by myself somewhere with nothing else to do. But that can’t be all of it. There are people out there who study this stuff. They have to like it. What are they getting that I’m not? What am I doing wrong?

And then I think about the word devour again. And the only thing I can think of that comes close to applying in my life are comic books. For a good eight years, from high school through college and a couple of years after, I read comic books religiously. I would buy basically every single comic book that came out each Wednesday. And yeah, I guess you could say I devoured them.

I had to stop eventually. My collection grew to be way to big, like I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do with all of my old comics. They’re taking up space. Everybody thinks that comics have some sort of collectible value, but I don’t buy that at all. If I go to a comic store and buy an issue, it’s going to be the same copy of the same issue that you can find numerous printings of in any comic store across the country. It’s simple supply and demand. All of the old comics are valuable simply because, at the time, nobody hung on to their old books. And so the first appearance of Superman is really valuable just because there are only like ten copies left.

But modern books? Every fanboy in the world keeps his or her comics sealed away in plastic bags. There’s no chance of anything becoming rare or vintage, unless the publishers decide to restrict the supply. And why would they? They’d sell less comics.

I don’t even know what I’m talking about. It’s probably because I never paid attention during philosophy class. It hurts too much to really think about what all of those old Greek guys were talking about. Like Plato comparing the soul to a charioteer trying to handle two horses. Or Nietzsche imagining staring into the abyss. Please. I don’t even know what any of that stuff means. When somebody writes my biography, it’s just going to be photocopied reprints, the Infinity Gauntlet and the Squadron Supreme and the Secret Wars and Maximum Clonage and the Age of Apocalypse and the Crisis on Infinite Earths. And nobody’s going to buy it. Or even write it. They’re all already written.

Stop telling me not to use my super strength

I always felt really bad for superheroes, the majority of them hiding away in their stupid civilian clothing, constantly pretending to be something they’re not, always in fear of having their secret discovered by some idiot who would then call up the closest reporter, giving away that secret for no better reason than because nobody in the comics has anything better to do.

What’s it have to be like to be Superman, only allowed to use his super abilities when he’s dressed up that ridiculous outfit? Of course nobody really considers it from his point of view, because he’s so easily able to put on a pair of glasses and pretend like he’s just a regular guy. But while his powers might seem uncanny to us earthlings, to him it’s just his nature. To him it must be a struggle to keep it all hidden away.

Imagine the earth was about to blow up, but your parents are these geniuses who, despite the fact that nobody listened to their warnings about the impending destruction, built a prototype rocket capable of sending you as infant to a habitable planet far away inhabited by a race of aliens that appeared almost identical to human beings.

But unlike human beings, these aliens can barely walk. They can’t run. They can’t lift anything heavy at all. In fact, they can’t really do anything. They barely have enough strength and intelligence just to go about surviving and procreating. And all of the sudden a spaceship crashes and guess who’s inside? It’s you.

And some aliens take you in and raise you, but you’re a little human baby, so you’re screaming and crying and running around and throwing stuff everywhere. And these aliens are completely shocked. They have no idea how to deal with your unimaginable powers. Even your screaming is impossible for them to comprehend, let alone deal with, because their inferior bodies can’t even produce audible sounds louder than a whisper.

So you’re whole life you have your adoptive parents telling you to pretend like you’re just like everybody else. No running. No talking loud. No lifting stuff up. That’s what it must have been like for Superman growing up in Kansas. It had to have been awful. His mom sends him to the store to go get some groceries. “But don’t you use any of that super speed! Walk slow! Really slow!” And now put yourself back on that alien planet from before, and your adoptive mom tells you to walk across the room to go get the remote, but she tells you to do it really deliberately, and make it look like it’s not a struggle to pick it up when you get there.

What’s that got to be like, to modulate your strength and your speed? It’s one thing to fake walking slow, but it’s another thing to fake it to the point to where it looks authentic. We always see Superman either walking like a regular person or running as fast as the Flash. Wouldn’t it look a little suspicious if Clark Kent started walking or running but only fifteen percent faster than a normal human would? How does he control it, make it look authentic?

Back on the alien planet. You pick up the remote, you have to actually act, to literally stage a performance of you straining to lift it up after you’ve already made a whole scene of pretending to walk over to get it really slowly. That must be exhausting. They never touch on it the comics, but the majority of Superman’s brain activity must have been engaged and spent constantly trying to make a convincing show, hoping not to raise anybody’s suspicions.

If that were me, if I were that baby in that rocket ship on that alien world that I made up to illustrate my point, I’d be so pissed off, constantly bitter. Why am I living my life pretending to be something that I’m not? Why can’t I just jump across the room and pick up the remote like it’s no big deal? And I eventually would. There’s no way I’d be able to keep a lid on my powers for too long.

Sooner or later I’d be in a bad enough mood where I’d just be like, you know what? I don’t care anymore. Hey everybody I can run fast. I can fly. I can lift up giant pieces of machinery and I have X-Ray vision and laser-eyes and freeze-breath and I have super hearing and I can read really fast and you can’t shoot me with a gun, I mean you can, but it would be a waste of a bullet because I’m bulletproof.

And that’s just Superman. I’m sure life on regular Earth must be equally frustrating for all superheroes, like Spider-Man and Iceman and She-Hulk and even more obscure superheroes like Deathlock or Speedball or even Aquaman’s teen sidekick Aqualad. I find it completely unbelievable that there would be even one person with the character to keep an identity secret for an entire lifetime, let alone a whole cast of costumed caped crusaders. These universes full of super beings should realistically just be a whole bunch of villains, people who were told to shut up and slow down their whole lives, that conformity is the only answer, that you have to suppress your super natures. And eventually they’d grow more and more bitter and vile until one day they’d snap and give a big collective middle finger to regular society and its bland conventions of normality and the status quo.

But, yeah, I don’t think that would sell a whole lot of comics, not to mention TV shows or movies or actions figures. Still, it’s something to think about. Just try walking super slowly from one side of the room to the other and tell me its not something interesting to think about.